


No Fairy Tales Here

by DollyPop



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Mentions of Lucy's beatdown, sap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 07:45:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3969751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DollyPop/pseuds/DollyPop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sting was no prince. Sting was a dragon, through and through. But Minerva wasn't a maiden, or a damsel. She was a lady. His.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Fairy Tales Here

She was never his lady before. She was, at first, just a lady. (and, to others, Little Miss, the Miss, Young Lass, and, finally, Lady) Perhaps even the lady. Then, The Lady, the capital letters imposing even when spoken. But not his. He remembers when that changed. He remembers it all.

—  
She was ruthless, steel-tongued, angry-eyed, cold and perhaps callous. He had respect for her, especially after they sparred. Minerva usually trained with the master. They would disappear somewhere for hours on end and the girl would limp back to her room when it was dark, covered in bruises and open wounds.

 

He never really liked the look of it. It felt excessive, as though it came from a place of malice and hatred. He wasn’t all too surprised, but it still left him with a sour taste in his mouth.

The first time he saw, he was heading to the guild’s bathroom. He didn’t understand why the place had to be built like a dorm, but he figured it must have something to do with the fact that Minerva was the Master’s daughter.

 

With a toothbrush in hand, and a towel around his waist, he wasn’t prepared for Minerva to be there, staring at herself in the mirror as she carefully stitched her cheek up, the blood dripping into the sink. He sucked in a breath, and she must have jabbed herself because a spurt slashed across the glass of the mirror and she whirled around, snarling.

 

“Get out!” she said, eyes bruised and ablaze.

 

And he just stood there, as though he were brain-dead. As though he were some statue. Or that she was a sculpture or a painting and he was observing. The embarrassment he would usually have over his scrawny, pre-teen body being exposed was gone. He felt cold.

 

“What happ-“

 

“Get out,” she repeated, this time with less fire as she chilled down to nitrogen. Back to the viper. She straightened her shoulders and looked at him, straight, into his eyes, and the green seemed to glow.

 

He was ashamed that he left. He was angry at himself that he didn’t help her. Didn’t bandage something up. Rogue had his fair share of scrapes, and Moses knows that Sting did, too. They knew their way around a medicinal kit.

 

He tried to console himself by believing that if she didn’t want help, he shouldn’t force it.

 

But he knew that was a lie.

—  
When he sparred with her, weeks later, it was a spectacle. Most of Sabertooth came to watch one of the Twin Dragons fight against their resident ice queen. He hadn’t been S-rank at that point but she had. He remembers her father sitting up in a chair high above them in the stadium, remembers Minerva looking tense and terrified and furious. When he thinks back, he realizes it is the look of a pit-bull when it has to fight.

 

It was a massacre, of course. Minerva had to win because Minerva always won. She had to come out on top. She was the youngest person to be made an S-rank mage since Fairy Tail decayed and fell to ruin. She was crueler that The Demon Mirajane, calculating as Erza Scarlett.

 

And scaredscaredscared. She covered it well, at the time. Though, it certainly became more transparent later, when she softened.

 

He had laid there, after the beat-down, staring up into the sky, taking note of his Master’s disapproving gaze and how there was no pride there. And Minerva walked away without a word and Rogue cleaned him up in the privacy of their shared room (because they weren’t valuable enough for individual bunkers, yet) and Sting licked his wounds in private and talked to Lector and popped his own damn arm back into the socket.

 

And he wondered if that’s how she had felt, standing in that dingy bathroom with a needle and thread and an open wound.

 

They didn’t spar after that. Minerva didn’t like to talk to him, either. Really, she didn’t like to talk to anyone. The Lady of Sabertooth was nitrogen-cold on the warmest of days. Impersonal and always prim. The very definition of a lady. The.

—  
Sting didn’t like being possessive. He was raised by a dragon, sure, the ultimate hoarders, but he found it uncomfortable. After living most of his life without anything to call his own, to suddenly claim ownership over anything was foreign.

 

When he got his own room, on the same floor as Minerva’s, after becoming S-rank, he sat in it and couldn’t sleep for three days. It was too new to him, but it had the ghosts of previous ownership about it. Small scratches on the wall, a tea-stain in the carpet, a burn mark in the door.

 

And there, under the bed, seemingly carved in with a fingernail: the initials, M. O. and he notices the purple walls and he remembers that it is his room.  
But he likes to share.  
—  
Thinking of her presence in his room was unnerving after a while. She slept right down the hall. She was smart. She was beautiful. She was callous and cold and so damn off-limits he didn’t even know what to do with himself but she was also there.

 

Or, a piece of her was.

 

It was selfish of him but he wanted to believe it. That he could reside in the same place as Minerva once did, that there was something he could still soothe and partake in. He wasn’t a caretaker by nature and Minerva was no pity case, but it was a jointure all the same.

 

A pact with a ghost and some stale air was still a pact, however flimsy.  
—–  
He was a teenage boy, then. Close to being an adult. Or, at least, close to not being a teenager anymore. And Minerva was beautifulbeautifulbeautiful and she started wearing dresses that slit, high, exposing her thighs and her hair grew longlonglong and she was so damn pretty.

 

Dragons loved beautiful things. He knew that much. It made him upset to think about it, but he remembered certain lessons, what his parent had imposed upon him.

 

When he was younger, even younger than then, he had read all the fairy tales about the maiden being offered for the dragon. There were never any epilogues. Some books had pages ripped out of them. He found one later, after he joined Sabertooth, and found out a prince always came to rescue the maiden.

 

Because she never came by choice. It was a solitary act, the dragon demanding a princess. He didn’t understand, when he was a babe, why it always ended with the maiden being taken. He assumed the happy ending, but never saw it. He didn’t know the happy ending never included the dragons. Never included him. There was the maiden, though. Always. But she was with someone else and the dragon was left in the pages past, where it couldn’t impose demands or rules or companionship.

 

But dragons got lonely, too.  
—–  
It wasn’t long after that that he realized he was sharing glances with her. Which was unusual, considering Minerva was always the ogled and never the one who does the ogling. That was fine by Sting. She was older than him by one year and he hadn’t really grown up.

 

Late bloomer, the older Sabertooth mages would say, amused.

 

Well, late or no, he had finally started to get taller. His voice deepened. His hair was unruly and spiked all the time but it looked nice, he thought. His blue eyes shone. The scar through his eyebrow made him look tough. He liked his body.

 

He liked his body, a lot, and he showed it. And when he locked eyes with Minerva, instead of just looking, he blushed so hard he thought even his stomach turned pink and when he looked back she had smiled.  
—  
He only dared to call her his in his head. Because she wasn’t. Because the dragon didn’t get to assume, didn’t get to request, definitely didn’t get to demand.

 

Was the dragon allowed to flirt?

 

No matter. In his head, she was his Lady. “My Lady”, he’d think, and then call her The in the morning. Or just “Lady”. She’d grown out of Minerva, really. It was easier to go by monikers.

 

He wanted her to call him hers. Her dragon. Pale and gaunt and white light as he was. Hers.

 

In his head, he was.  
—-  
It began to slip out, randomly. Then, on purpose, with sarcasm and charm and a smirk. He’d had girlfriends, then. She’d left his head. The thighs, the hair, her eyes. So what? Other women had that. So he grew jaded, a bit. And playful and bluffing and no one could deny they had a good chemistry.

 

So, they started being lumped into a team. First, Sting and Rogue and Minerva. A triad. And then Rufus. And then Ogre.

 

Later, Yukino came along and Rogue looked like Sting did, with his eyes clouded down and sulky. And Yukino smiled at him so warmly. And, GOD, it was so obvious when they came back from "training" with swollen lips.

 

When Rufus rolled his eyes and said Yukino looking at Rogue was Minerva looking at Sting, he paid it no mind.  
—-  
It was sick, sure, but Minerva in that water was a sight. The Games weren’t ever a major threat to Sabertooth: they dominated. And this, well, this was proof. Minerva wasn’t just the best, she had to prove she was the cruelest. And she beat that blond girl around until she held her out of that water bubble by her hair, arms out and triumphant.

Minerva looked, for all her faults, radiant. The swimsuit was modest, compared to the other mages, but she was toned from years of intense training. The blond girl, Lucy, he thinks, didn't seem so pretty after Minerva was done. And he called her his lady, then. A claim. A talisman.

 

She was his girl. He wasn't proud of what she did but he was proud of her. Enough that he got between her and Natsu and Gajeel and all the other decayed mages of Fairy Tail come back from the grave. He was ready to defend her.  
\---  
When Jiemma stripped Yukino naked, Sting stared right at Rogue. His best friend, his partner, his brother in this world and the next. He saw the clenched jaw, how Rogue just wanted to rip his maw open and howl, wrap Yukino in shadows. The jeers were sick. Yukino was a beautiful woman and the guild was full of people who were lonely and learned cruelty faster than kindness.

She was banished. She had nothing. Rogue could fight, but he didn't have enough pull to bring mages into the guild. Sting felt something furious bubble in his stomach and he looked over to Minerva and saw her blank. She must have learned long ago that emotion with Jiemma was useless.

So, later, in the middle of the night, Sting pretended he didn't hear Minerva sneak to the gates to let Yukino in. He pretended he didn't hear the feather soft knocks on Rogue's door, the embrace that happened afterward. He pretended he didn't hear the swish of long, black hair entering into Yukino's room and collecting her things so she would have something in that big, horrible world.

He pretended, but he couldn't help smiling.

\----

He couldn't recognize himself when he murdered Jiemma. All he knew was that it was for Lector, and Yukino and everyone else who was brutalized by their opressive leader. And he thought Lector was gone, dead.

When Minerva said Lector was alive, he felt like his heart had burst. He thought, with unimaginable naivety, that she had saved him because they were friends. Because she, perhaps, liked Sting. But he was a bargaining chip, instead. And Sting was bitter and so fucking sad. And then, he finds himself angry.

They weren't a fairy tale. They weren't Fairy Tail, either, with their bullshit love and friendship and adoration. 

So he went into the arena. And he tried. He tried so damn hard and he still failed against the ghosts of Fairy Tail's past and he just couldn't do it anymore. 

He heard Minerva had curled up, crying. He saw the footage later, replaying it in the dark of his room. Her body, curled and scratched, small and fetal. Her face was swollen with tears. And he cried, too. 

He didn't want to acknowledge what that meant for them. 

\---- —-  
It didn’t take any thought to save her. Sure, she left. Sure, she was vicious and angry. But when he held her in his arms, Rogue next to him as defense and he told her “We’ve come for you, Milady” and her eyes filled with tears, he couldn’t think of ever leaving her behind. Despite it all.

He flashed back to that night at the bathroom, when she patched herself, alone. He remembers being in the room her ghost had been in, where he slept, sharing. He recalls looking her in the eyes for the first time, being proud of her, being beaten by her, being humiliated and sad and still hopeful and still loving her.

Rogue looks over at them for a split second, but Sting knows the pose he’s in. He knows a bridal carry. He saw it in the pages of the books, after the dragon was slain.

But he is no prince. He is a dragon, through and through. And Minerva isn’t some maiden or a damsel or anything of the sort. She is a Lady. His Lady.

They were still the same. He thinks he's ready to defend her, to the death, maybe. At least to injury. Not that she would need it. Minerva is smart but she is also broken and at first, he doesn't know if he's ready to stand by her as she heals. Then, he knows he is. He knows when he is furious at Jiemma for his insults. He knows when he doesn't blame her. He knows when she is the first person he looks for after the dust settles: Minerva, his lady, so damn broken.

Later, in the guild that is his, yet still in the room that was once hers, she is piecing herself back together. With her back turned to him, her body in that bandage dress, she is trying to patch herself alone. He steps in front of her, eyes soft and holds out his hand: offering help, offering hope, offering himself.

“Milady?”

And she looks at him when she hears the nickname. And she takes his hand. And her smile is the thinnest, most delicate thing he has ever seen.

"Yeah, Sting. Yeah."

**Author's Note:**

> This ship DEMANDS more fics. It just does. Please.


End file.
